Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Pricing, range/specs, helpful staff/tech support . |
| Disadvantages: |
Not a store in every town, RAM upgrade unavailable when I visited . |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
In late September of last year (2002) I purchased an Evesham Voyager 5614 laptop from Evesham.com in Swansea (now relocated to the Evesham Microstore shop opposite the Grand Theatre).
When considering which PC I was going to buy for university, there were a number of considerations. Chief amongst these were speed, size and price.
I visited all the major PC retailers in my area, and online, and eventually decided that a laptop was my best bet, as it allowed portability (if I need to take it to lectures, the library etc) and the gap between desktop and laptop speed and spec is now so small as to be negligible where everyday use is concerned. PC World and the other Dixons group stores offered a good selection of brands, and a wide variety of specs. Dell seemed to have high powered, yet high priced machines, whilst Evesham, from who I had purchased my last desktop PC, had a range which appeared to offer a good compromise between power and price. Thus, it was to Evesham that I eventually went.
The Evesham store in Swansea had several models on show, the 5600 series being one of them. First impressions were good and so I decided to purchase the 5614 for £1291 including VAT, mainly due to the price, processor speed, hard drive size, presence of an 16 MB ATI graphics card and fast DVD/CDRW combo drive, as well as its potential for connection - it has inbuilt ethernet (no need for a newtork card to connect in uni), 2 x USB ports, a spare PCMCIA slot and also firewire/infra red connectivity. The staff were particularly helpful, and advised me on a number of matters which I was not sure of. However, at this point, my only real problem with the purchase occured.
The Evesham catalogue stated that I could upgrade the RAM from 256 MB to 512 MB when purchasing, for around an extra £60-£80 (from what I remember). This was something I wished to do, and had done successfully with my desktop PC at the time of purchase. However, for some reason, the option wasn't available on that particular day, and due to the time constraints (needing the PC for the start of uni) I couldn't afford to wait on it. This was a bit annoying, but the PC was still as good as anything else I'd seen, so I decided I could cope with 256MB of RAM, and the staff explained how I could upgrade in the future. The staff did try a number of methods to get the upgrade become available, but unfortunately these met with no success.
Payment and delivery was both fast and easy, the laptop arrived well within the stated 2 week period and was easily set up - once unpacked it was merely a case of switching it on and registering a few things.
Since purchasing the laptop I have experienced no problems. However, when the hard drive on my desktop PC, also purchased from Evesham's Swansea store burnt out a few weeks ago (the engineer said there was no reason for the crash, it just happens from time to time), Evesham Tech Support answered all my emails within 24 hours of receiving them, and phoned me to arrange a time at which an engineer could inspect the PC. He arrived within the specified time of 9am-1pm on the given date, and was able to highlight the problem, install a new hard drive at no cost to myself (as the machine is still under warranty) and reinstall my OS, all the drivers and software, and also update these to the newest version.
Overall, I have been impressed by both Evesham's products and service, and would reccomend them to anyone wanting to buy a PC that has a good specification for a reasonable price. I for one, will not hesitate to use them in the future.
very helpful
very helpful
very helpful
very helpful
